The Restored: Chapter Thirty-Eight

The tires of the automobile screeched down the street, and Rhys let out a scream almost as loud as the tired were as yet another demon was dissolved by the magic of the spell components they were holding.

“Stop being a baby!” Hadiya said as she pulled the automobile to a stop, slamming on the brakes so hard that Rhys’ head actually smacked into the windshield. Idly, he considered that there really ought to be something that could stop people from doing that. Maybe if there was some sort of force tether to keep people tied to their seats? But that would put an extra burden on the aura generator… Something more physical, then? A leather strap that tied a person in?

He shook his head, blinking rapidly as he heard something tear itself out of the dirt next to the automobile. Most of the demons had leaned to steer clear of the horseless carriage as it raced through the broken and destroyed streets, but some were persistent. Rhys aimed one of the spell anchors down, flooding it with a bit of his own aura. Cutting the aura tap into the ritual and re-assembling the pieces had taken a bit of time, but it was well worth it, as the sphere of protection it generated could be expanded out with the aura. 

The demon under the car dissolved, and Rhys had just a moment to consider if this counted as murder or not before Hadiya was throwing the car into reverse, turning around a chunk of airship, and shooting down another street. Had she made a modification to increase the throughput of the force enchantments while he wasn’t looking? 

They bumped down the street until Hadiya spun the steering wheel, and the horrible death contraption let out a screech, turning and nearly slamming into the wall. 

“Go!” she shouted, and the pair leapt from the cabin. 

Rhys poured aura into the pieces he was holdin, working to shield Hadiya and open the back door, while Hadiya scrambled around the front and began to pick up the chunks of stone they’d carved the spell anchors into. She tossed them into the back seat even as a demon swooped down on them, and Rhys had to leap closer, thrusting his own stones forward. It flared its wings, trying to pull back, and Rhys was forced to let it as a mole-like demon tried to burst up under the aura generator. He leapt back and shoved the stones down, dissolving it before it could disconnect the crystal. 

“Done!” Hadiya shouted as she sprinted around to the front of the car. Rhys had barely even shut the door before they shot off again, swerving to avoid someone who’d leapt out into the street with a giant hammer made out of what looked like a thousand human teeth. 

“I don’t know if that was a human or a demon. Either way, I half think you should have hit them,” Rhys muttered under his breath. Hadiya let out a braying laugh and pushed her foot down even harder on the pedal, somehow managing to coax more speed from the aura generator. They were going to overdraw on it and burn it out at this rate. 

As they made their way towards the center of the city, the condition of the buildings slowly became better. Though the center of the city had also been forced to deal with the crashing airships, and none of the buildings looked pretty, there was still enough of a concentration of wealth that several of the buildings had used steel and magic, rather than just enchanting copper to act like steel, and thus hadn’t been quite as dramatically impacted by the impacts as the more enchantment-heavy buildings further out.

The buildings might have been in better shape, but the people certainly weren’t. The central Throne of Sacrifice had spawned far more demons than the lesser thrones, and the violence in this part of the city was much worse. They were forced to slow down to avoid potentially overloading their Fallen Void exclusion zone, as even though the spell was absurdly powerful, it wasn’t designed to be used in this manner. 

They were only ten minutes out from the lab when Rhys spotted it. There was a dome of silver light near the center of the city, and around it, a war raged. All three of the Demonic Thrones seemed to be within a few blocks of one another, and a group of three figures was battling against them. 

Rhys spotted Archamge Davalier swinging her hand and conjuring sweeping arcs of wind, vibrating at an absurd frequently, that sliced through the throne of who he thought might be Deepwater, but he wasn’t sure. Waves of pressure and water met sound and wind, and both opponents were sent flying back, but the winds caught Davalier, and she managed to redirect the air pressure to crunch down on the horde of lesser demons that the Throne was conjuring. 

She rose into the air, and a powerful wind lifted three automobiles, flinging them at the Throne. The blue demon on top held out his hand and they crunched into tiny orbs, and that was the last Rhys caught of the battle. 

A man with dirty blond hair in a black overcoat was battling a Throne that was conjuring waves of hellfire large enough to completely swallow their automobile three times over, but every time it got close, the man seemed to knock it into the path of the summoned demons. He was bouncing around like a madman, silver light and black lightning crackling into what looked like a rapidly constructed spell using elements of the faerie tongue. 

The ligature must have summoned a Storm King in order to help deal with the threat. That actually cheered Rhys up some – if there was a Faerie King on their side, that at least meant they had two archmage level threats to combat the three remaining thrones. 

Then he caught sight of the third figure in the battle and let out a gasp. 

“What?” Hadiya asked, her foot jerking over to the brake. 

“It’s Axel!” Rhys said, pointing at the fight. 

Sure enough, the man that Rhys was pretty sure he was falling for was standing atop a platform of copper, six metallic swords floating around him. That would have been normal enough – Axel was an excellent combat mage, and his unique tricks allowed him to kill even deadly threats. 

But it wasn’t just Axel. Red light was racing over his body, and a pair of demonic horns were curling off his head. His eyes were also totally red, and the pistol in his hands was surrounded by a massive construct of red light that looked more like an anti-airship gun than anything a human could reasonably use. Rhys was only able to spot him for a second before he was gone, moving with a speed that Rhys couldn’t track, and the sound of amplified gunshots rang out, even louder than the hundreds of echoing bullets from the halls and buildings across the city. 

His opponent was clearly the Arenamaster, and she looked like she’d retained the most humanity out of all the people who’d participated in the ritual. Honestly, she looked more human than Axel did at the moment, like a more exaggerated version of the woman she’d been before. Red light swirled from her hands, and even as her head was turned to little more than a spattering of blood and red light by Axel’s attacks, she was rebuilding herself with her magic. Chains of light speared from her to attack Axel, and Rhys pressed his face to the glass to try and watch, but they were already pulling into the garage of Elucidate Labs. 

“I’ll be right back,” Hadiya said, shutting the garage behind her as she ran off. Rhys waited in the automobile, watching nervously, but the wards of the powerful corporation were clearly top notch. Demons banged at the doors, but even the sounds of their attacks and the outdoor battle was muted down to an almost pleasant level of background noise. 

Rhys stepped out of the car and began moving the anchors they’d gathered from all of their locations out of the back of the car and into a large basket that Elucidate used for waste disposal. 

Hadiya returned after a few minutes, clutching a vial with a single drop of liquid. The droplet glowed like the sun, and Rhys could actually see the Aura flowing off of it with his bare eyes.  

“When you said it was like a ley line in a bottle, you weren’t kidding…” Rhys said, shaking his head. “Fallen Void. No wonder Nexus was trying to procure more.”

Hadiya just grunted an affirmative as she backed out of the garage, the tire rolling over the face of a mole-like demon as she moved, and they shot off to the Central Aura Depository. 

“Got all twenty-five anchors?” Hadiya asked as they slowed to approach. 

“In the basket,” he said, pointing to the back. She nodded, and they emerged from the car, him lugging the basket while she held the miracle drop near the rocks. The spell they had might have used a few different techniques similar to enchanting, since those were Hadiyas’ wheelhouse due to the tattoo experiments, but it was still a ritual, and it greedily sucked in the aura, draining it to expand their sphere of Fallen Void exclusion. 

When they pushed in the doors, Rhys almost dropped the basket. The entire thing was a horror show, with bodies strewn all over the ground. Whatever Alyphize had done to break into the vault, it hadn’t left anyone alive. 

They headed in deeper, doing their best to ignore the bodies. They could address that another time – right now, they needed to banish the Throne of Sacrifice. As they approached the giant crystal that served as the central point for the ritual, they heard the crashing sounds, and Hadiya froze. Rhys did as well, and they carefully peeked through the doors.

A pair of demons was fighting. One of them was humanoid, save for sharp claws, small horns, and a thin, lashing tail. He wore what might have once been a well-tailored suit, but it had mostly been shredded to ribbons. He was missing one hand, and was covered in cuts leaking soulstuff, and he was gasping. 

His opponent was Alyphize. 

She was in awful condition. She looked like she was little more than a skeleton, with nothing but thin bones traced of red light. Her face was the only part of her that was still in any sort of human-like condition, and frankly was the only reason he recognized her. Whatever Davalier had done, it clearly hadn’t killed her, but it had taken a heavy toll. 

If she’d been anything other than one of the eleven – now twelve – major Thrones, she’d have been dead long ago. As things were, she was drawing power down from the sky overhead just to keep herself held together, but even so weakened, she matched the other man. 

Rhys didn’t know who he was, but the fact that he was holding off someone tied to the Throne of Sacrifice was slightly terrifying. Alyphize couldn’t draw its full power unless she was on the Throne, but she was still more than any other demon should be. 

Rhys might not have recognized him, but Hadiya did. 

“Contractor,” she whispered. 

“That’s the Contractor that Axel was talking about?” Rhys asked, keeping his voice low. 

“Yes. He’s a major player in the undercity. Fair, as far as such things go.” 

That was when a spike of soulstuff reached out, jabbing into both of them, and the Contractor’s smooth voice entered their heads. 

“That’s quite the nasty bit of spellwork you’ve got there. Help me kill Alyphize, and I’ll take the Throne and banish it back to the Void. The others may be a bit harder, but with Sacrifice gone, they’ll be partially untethered. That drop you’re sacrificing will be more than enough to overwhelm them.” 

Even as he spoke, he continued to battle Alyphize, conjuring spikes of red light that bound her skeletal hands together, broke her curses, and seemingly teleported him around the room. 

“You want the Throne of Sacrifice?” Hadiya asked. “Are you certain you’ll even be compatible?” 

“Why should we trust you?” Rhys added, and was instantly hit with the mental image of the demonic binding magic. He would need a bit to parse it, but the fact the Contractor was willing to entreat with them was a good sign. Even as Rhys started to read, his baritone rang out in their heads again to answer Hadiya. 

“I didn’t want the Throne restored at all, the price was too high. But it’s here now. And what is a Contract but two sides making a Sacrifice?”